Well, pour one out for the United Airlines Landline bus route between Fort Collins-Loveland Airport and DIA—it’s officially dead. Aviation Week reports that United quietly ended the service after realizing Coloradans prefer car keys over bus schedules. Shocking.
The Bullet Point Brief
- United’s Landline bus experiment quietly died like a Prius in a Wyoming blizzard.
- It linked Fort Collins-Loveland to DIA, if you were lucky enough to match your flight with their paltry schedule.
- Surprise: People want freedom over timetables. Who knew?
- Yet we’ll still get lectured about expanding mass transit while our roads resemble post-apocalyptic pothole mazes.
My Bottom Line
So let me get this straight—Coloradans like the idea of public transportation… just not for themselves. We love feeling virtuous about buses and choo-choos so long as they shuttle someone else around while we cruise past them in our trucks doing 80 mph with a coffee in one hand and a donut in the other. That’s not hypocrisy—that’s just Colorado reality.
I never used this Landline service—and neither did most folks. Because here’s the thing: out here, we value freedom of movement more than sticking to someone else’s schedule. We don’t want to wait on a delayed shuttle that smells like stale Red Bull and broken dreams. We want to hop in our cars, set our own pace, and avoid becoming hostages to yet another centralized system with questionable reliability (looking at you, RTD, Bustang).
The same reason United’s service fails applies to government-run mass transit in Colorado – the demand just ain’t here.
But sure—let’s keep pitching billions into mass transit nobody rides while regular roads crumble under us like gluten-free brownies at a church potluck. Maybe if CDOT spent less time daydreaming about trains and more time filling potholes and building roads, people wouldn’t dread commuting like it’s punishment from God.
Turns out United figured it out way before the bureaucrats did: forced convenience isn’t actually convenient when people don’t use it. Let this be a lesson before we go burning $2 BILLION on Polis’ magical Front Range choo-choo-that-could—but won’t.
